Ground Escapes and Striking in the Guard (diary entry)

25.03.13

General Lesson

There wasn’t a set theme for tonight again other than addressing clear areas that needed greater work. Not everyone was present, so issues I wanted to handle this week were shelved. The first area I was concerned with was general conditioning. The Straight Blast Gym’s Karl Tanswell named conditioning as the most neglected area in all combative training and he has a good point. I warmed everyone up and focused entirely on basic movements, but repeated for lengthy repetitions, under pressure and with a careful eye for detail. All sprawls were deep, all punching was done from a tight guard and all those wavering were checked. We then went immediately into some rolling (ground grappling). It was important for me to see everyone fight without a chance of rest from some intensive cardiovascular exercising.

We then moved onto the sit-through. This is a fundamental ground grappling move, usually performed as an escape. We looked at in its most basic form, escaping a top over-hook from the “turtling” position. The student executes the escape and takes the back. The training partner then assumes the turtle position. We then looked at getting the hooks in and taking the back mount into a straightforward rear-naked choke or an arm-bar.

The class moved onto a basic boxing three-punch combination. Seniors need to raise their game more and at the juniors needed to slow down and look at their technique.

The lesson finished with two rounds of MMA sparring.

Private Lesson

We warmed up with some coaching mirror footwork – one partner leads and prompts sprawls with low line signals. This moved onto taking the back grappling, where both participants fight to take each other’s backs. We went to the ground with a simple long-guard behaviour exercise I acquired from Mo Teague I simply call “Touch the Head”. This involves one participant defending from their back whilst the other attacks from a standing position. The standing participant attempts to get past the grounded participant’s guard and touch their head.

We took this simple game and turned it into the beginning of several guard-orientated MMA exercises. First, the grounded student acted as coach and put on a pair of focus mitts. Coaching as learning is a core approach to CCMA. A coach in this situation has arguably a harder role than the student. He has to be able to provide obstacles via use of his legs, only using the long-guard (hook guard and other variations), and also hold the targets/provide feedback for the standing student. Next we went to mid-range, using the basic butterfly guard position. Finally we moved onto the closed guard. All students played both roles. We then did some specific sparring from all three ranges.